I talk a lot about eBay research on my blog, and for a good reason – I strongly believe that doing proper research BEFORE you invest your money in any product can save you from costly mistakes, the most common being when you can’t sell your products due to the price being too high OR simply because there’s not enough demand for the product you have sourced.

There are situations where doing product research is a bit tricky, due to there being many variations, styles, models etc. So in today’s post let’s try to resolve this problem and take a closer look at how to do Terapeak research for products like these.

Hi Andrew,

Firstly, can I just say that your blog is great! Things I like are not only the information but also it seems to be UK focused which is a good niche as so many of these type of blogs are all US focused which is ok up to a point, until they start recommending US wholesalers/freight forwarders etc. and general U.S market focused tips so you’re in a good niche.

I hope you don’t mind answering questions. I will probably buy one of your courses as they seem reasonably priced but to be honest so many people are out there selling “make money on eBay/Amazon” courses that I can’t help but feel that the market is too well known and over exploited. But then again I definitely overthink things, as you will see from my question.

Anyway, sorry, I will get to the point. I was reading your “Best Products To Sell in 2016” post and it was good to see a clear process. But one issue I have is how specific do you have to be when crunching the numbers on Terapeak?

For example on my spreadsheet of product ideas I might have “men’s wallets” but there are tens of thousands of listings for men’s wallets on eBay, priced anywhere from £2 to £50. Just writing “men’s wallets” into Terapeak will yield very broad results. Would it not be better to pick a product, men’s wallets for example, go on eBay and click on the product listing description then put all of those product listings into Terapeak to find the best one? But even that seems a bit random and long winded.

So in summary how do you go from a general product category to discovering how to “niche down” to men’s, black leather, double fold with card holder as the product to sell? Or even what to put into Terapeak for the best stats?

Hope this makes sense.

Many thanks, Tom

Hi Tom,

Thanks for your email & question.

Yes, men’s wallets is a classic example of a situation where you struggle with getting proper, targeted results doing Terapeak research.

If you simply search for “men’s wallet”, you’ll get results from ALL listings that have the keyword phrase “men’s wallet” in the listing title. This means brown, white, black wallets. Leather, wooden, plastic wallets. Big, small wallets. Plain colour, patterned and customised wallets.

It can go as far as getting results for items that are totally unrelated to what you’re trying to research! For example, if you search for “purse”, you’ll also get results from listings that sell materials to make purses, special jewellery for purses, purse cleaning products and so on.

So how do you do targeted research in situations like this?

The first thing you want to do is make sure you filter down to the category that is most suitable for the product you’re researching. That will remove any totally unrelated products from your results.

Next, you need to decide how to narrow down your research by adding additional keywords. There are 3 main ways to do this:

Come up with related keywords on your own. If you know at least something about the products you want to sell, you’ll know what styles/features/materials there are. So if we take the same “men’s wallet” example, you can add words like Leather, Black, Brown and similar to it.

Do a search on eBay for that broad term, e.g. “men’s wallet”. Go through the first page of search results and see what keywords are used in the most popular listings with the most sales.

Use the SEO tool in Terapeak. This is the quickest and easiest way to find related keywords to any such broad term. All you have to do is go to Terapeak, SEO and start typing in your main search phrase, word by word. If you enter “men’s wallet”, it will give you the most popular, related keywords for that item. This essentially also shows what kind of variation for that product is most popular on eBay (and Google too as Terapeak’s SEO tool also shows Google search keywords – they’re highlighted green).

As you can see, Terapeak gave me various additional keywords, like:

Card

Holder

Credit

Luxury

Soft

Bifold

Brown

Coin

etc.

And the functionality does not end there! You can simply click on suggested keywords to create a new search phrase AND then do direct Product Research via Terapeak for that phrase. All you have to do is click on the RESEARCH button and you’ll be automatically transferred to the classic Product Research page with results shown for your phrase:

This is a SUPER EASY and incredibly handy way of finding the most in demand product variations, with little competition, as Terapeak literally shows you what kind of variations people are looking for.

Obviously you don’t want to overdo this – don’t select too many keywords here. Otherwise you may get too good to be true data, like 100% sell-through rates, just 1 seller per day etc. This is because if you pick too many keywords, it would basically mean that only one listing uses them all, showing you biased results.

Usually you’d want to add a maximum of one or two keywords to the broad search phrase you’re using, so a few examples for “men’s wallet” would be:

As always, I also recommend doing a manual search on eBay for that product to see what kind of competition you’re up against, how professional the first page of listings are, what the general price point is for the top 10-20 results and so on.